Maintaining a website and creating content can be fun, but it also requires an investment of time, money, and hard work. And, although you have most likely already monetized your site with your products and services, you can make your efforts pay off even more by adding passive income streams to your website, blog, or other online platforms you maintain.

This module explores different ways you can make your website and blog more profitable with passive income, so you can implement the most effective methods to make your content work even harder for your business.

Generate Passive Income with Affiliate Links

In affiliate marketing, you earn a commission by recommending and selling other people’s products.

Commission rates vary according to the product you’re recommending, and it’s possible to earn a decent income this way. In fact, in recent years it’s become a key source of online income for many professional bloggers.

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income regularly discloses his earnings from affiliate income, and he earns well over $100,000 each month, sometimes as much as $300,000. Now, he’s obviously a unique example, but many people are earning a large part of their income from affiliate marketing and it’s a relatively quick and easy way for you to get started on your passive income plan.

Add Affiliate Links to Your Site

You can add affiliate links within blog posts and other site content, and you’ll earn a commission each time someone decides to click through and purchase one of your recommendations.

You could write a review post specifically for a product you have tested or used regularly, and you know your audience will find useful. You could write a list post of useful online tools (e.g. plugins) and make each link an affiliate link. Or you can add links as mentions of products or services occur naturally within other content. For example, if you’re writing a blog post about writing tips and you mention an online membership site for writers, or paid-for proofreading software.

Amazon Affiliate Program

Amazon is one of the world’s largest online retailers, and you can make a commission from anything they sell. You’ll almost certainly find something relevant to your niche among their massive offerings. You can get links, banners, and widgets for your site or blog, and it’s an easy way to monetize those platforms.

Affiliate Marketplaces

Affiliate marketplaces or networks are essentially databases or directories of affiliate programs in different business niches. These include ClickBank, ShareaASale, Rakuten, C J Affiliate, E-Junkie, and more.

• Do your research: Check each one out to see how much their commission rates are, how often they pay out (for example, net 20 days, or when your commissions reach $50) and how user-friendly their interface is.
• The larger marketplaces have more potential products to choose from, but their customer support might be lacking because of the sheer scale of the number of merchants and affiliates they have to deal with.
• Joining one or two of the big affiliate networks is a good way to get started as you have a database of thousands to search to find suitable products. They take care of all your commission payments for you and you can keep track of everything in one place. ClickBank is one of the largest and most well-known, with a wide range of products, and reportedly good levels of support.
• Search for what’s profitable and popular in your niche, and according to your keywords.

Private Affiliate Programs

Your business network is a potentially good source of affiliate products. Who do you have a positive relationship with in your network whom you know sells great products or services that are relevant to your clients or customers, and who has an affiliate program? You could sign up for their program and be ready to recommend and promote when they release a new product.

Or do a search for people in your niche and find out if they have an affiliate program you can join. Details will usually be somewhere on their website, but if you can’t see anything, it doesn’t hurt to ask. Some business owners will have an approval process for their affiliates so they can be sure of selecting people to endorse their products or services whose reputation and values align with their own. For others, you will be able to simply sign up.

Other Sites

Look at other sites in your niche and see what products they’re endorsing.

Offer Your Own Products or Services

If you have your own products you can set up an affiliate program so that people can sell your products.

Create a Dedicated Recommended Products Page for Affiliate Links

You could have a dedicated page where you recommend the tools, products and resources you use for your business. For example:

• Web hosting
• Blog themes
• Plugins
• Software
• Sales tools (such as CRM or landing page tools)
• Stock photo sites
• Recommended books and ebooks
• Online training programs you’ve taken and can recommend

You’ve probably seen a lot of bloggers and website owners using these – they’re an excellent and simple way to add passive income potential to your site. They’re usually created using a static web page rather than a regular blog post.

TIP: Make your recommended products page well-organized. Arrange it into categories (e.g. social media tools, content creation tools, productivity tools) – whatever is relevant to your chosen recommended products.

Affiliate Tips:

• Only give honest reviews, and recommendations for tools and resources you know well and you’re happy to endorse. If you recommend something you haven’t tried yourself and it turns out to be a scam or an inferior product that negatively affects your clients, you will lose their trust and suffer damage to your reputation.

• Choose affiliate partners carefully according to their reputation, as their reputation reflects on yours.
• Make your recommendations extra useful by adding a review for each product or service. Include how long you’ve been using it, why you like it, the positive benefits it’s had for your business, etc.
• Always clearly and conspicuously disclose any affiliate links. They should be conspicuous both on a computer screen and on mobile devices.

Your disclosure needs to be close enough to the affiliate link so that readers can see it before they click to make a purchase. You need to consider whether a disclosure in your site footer or sidebar, or a disclosure that requires scrolling to see it, is adequate, as these may not be seen before the site visitor makes a purchase via your link. Disclosure for affiliate links is covered by law, so be sure to know how that law applies to you and your site in your location.

Affiliate Tools

• VigLink, Skimlinks – affiliate links are created automatically from normal links, so there’s no need to sign up to an affiliate program.

• URL shorteners – ThirstyAffiliate WordPress plugin, Pretty Link plugin, Bitly

Sell Advertising Space on Your Website or Blog

This is perhaps the most ‘passive’ of passive income methods, but it’s also the most difficult to make any decent money from. You need a huge amount of traffic to your website or blog to make money through advertising, so it works best if you already have a lot of traffic going there. The more visitors you have, the more potential clicks on the ads on your site.

For this passive income method, you sell space on your site to other businesses who would like to reach the people in your niche, or in a closely-related niche. 

As with affiliate partners and products, choose who you sell space to carefully as you don’t want to negatively affect your reputation.

The most common places to put ads are in your site’s sidebar or header.

How much you can charge for ad space often depends on the amount of traffic you have, but you can set your own flat rate prices.

Finding advertisers:

• Look at other sites/blogs in your niche. Who is advertising with them?
• Contact relevant businesses and ask them if you can advertise for them.
• Find subject-specific ad networks for your site. For example, networks running ads relevant to Mom Bloggers. A quick search online for ‘ad networks for mom bloggers’ brings up results for networks such as CafeMom and GlamMedia. Try a similar search for relevant ads for your blog.
• Create an “advertise here” banner on your site where advertisers can see that you accept ads, and how to contact you about your rates.

Put Google AdSense on your site

Google AdSense lets advertisers run their ads on your site. Once you sign up, Google places a code on your site and starts displaying adverts relevant to your content/business. When someone clicks on the ad, you receive a payment – this will most likely be based on each click (CPC), or when someone buys something via your link (CPA). There’s no minimum traffic requirement with AdSense, so anyone can start.

Potential Risks or Drawbacks of Putting Ads on Your Site/Blog

• They conflict with your call to action – if you want your visitors to buy one of your products or services from your site, why effectively create a call to action whose purpose is to take visitors away from your site?
• Some people find them annoying, so much so that they use ad blockers.
• Having ads on your site may dilute your website or blog’s overall goal and mission, and its design.

While advertising can be a difficult source of income for some, recommending affiliate products is one of the easiest sources of passive income.

If you do nothing else, be sure to use an affiliate link when referring people to a product, service or tool that you use. Your customers rely on recommendations and, if they already trust you, they’ll be eager to hear what you use in your own business.